Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it. - 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24
Personal feelings about eschatology
Honestly, I don't like eschatology because it goes one of two ways in my life - either it's eisegetical connections between current events or politicians and random Bible verses or it's a regurgitation of some scholar's system. It's often emotional, confusing, and argumentative. Revelation itself contains the most glorious displays of God's majesty and power and beauty in the Bible (the crystal sea! the holy city Jerusalem! Jesus on a white horse!! ), so I wish the "what seal are we on?" people would stop making end-times discussion stressful. Because silly as I am, it genuinely gives me anxiety to hear that my debit card chip or vaccine unintentionally caused me to worship the Antichrist and be damned to Hell when it's just obvious that stars aren't falling from the sky and all the waters aren't blood.
Seeing something then trying to find it in Revelation, especially based on superficial, incomplete similarities, is eisegesis. Multiple people in 2010 unironically told me that the BP oil spill was sign of the end-times, after Revelation 16:3, "The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing died that was in the sea." (Even found an article for it -> https://www.newsweek.com/some-say-bps-oil-spill-heralds-apocalypse-73117.) Someone even told me John must have been watching the oil spill at that moment. That's so dramatic compared to the reality of the event! This is not rightly handling the word of truth.
On the other side, the nerdy people act like they have a reasoned and complete understanding of Revelation. Are we reading the same book? It's opaque, probably especially for those not immersed in Jewish literature. Messianic prophecies were opaque to the Intertestamental Period Jews. They knew enough to anticipate a descendant from David's line, but Christ was born to barely any audience at all and faced a lot of rejection from the religious scholars of His day. Even His own followers seemed to be confused about the nature of the kingdom He was building. Are we going to be any better at anticipating the day of the Lord? I don't doubt we'll recognize the day when it comes, but no way anyone will say, "It's just like I imagined!" It's an interesting topic to study and clearly a blessed one (Revelation 1:3), but claiming you got it all figured out seems self-wise or as though you are mastering a human curriculum of eschatology instead of the Word.
I get that it's really hard not to fall into eisegesis or memorizing other people's concept of Scripture, though. I want to eat the book and know what is there and eliminate any time a Bible teacher, a scholar, or pop culture led me astray. Thankfully, the truth is simple, so there's no gain in being academic or Gnostic about it. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. - 1 Corinthians 13:8 We'll never know the real secrets of the world until the perfect comes, so it's so much more important to love God and our neighbors than to be learned.
List
- Amillennialism, premillennial
- Antichrist
- J. N. Darby
- Day of the Lord, Second Coming
- Dispensationalism
- End times
- Lawless one, man of lawlessness, son of destruction
- William Miller, Millerite movement, Adventists' movement
- Rapture
- Pre-tribulationism, mid-tribulationism, post-tribulationism
- Pre-wrath